I have experience with this and I still firmly dislike React Native. I am currently using Flutter, but am looking forward to Kotlin Multiplatform improvements which will soon also be available on the 3 platforms

Do you have a source for that? I say this because it made the news everywhere when it was exposed. Just to be clear… it wasn’t that affiliate links made the index. The Brave browser would hijack what you typed in the URL bar, even if it was the exact URL, with their own affiliate link

Just to comment on the “devolve into approval”, if I were to vote strategically with a score voting system like star and 3 candidates, I would give my first preference 5 stars, my second 1 star, and my third no stars. This couldn’t be done with approval and in the instant runoff step my full vote would go to either my favorite or second if they made it. And unlike rcv IRV I was also able to express significant difference between my choices.

As a side note, I don’t really like the term “rcv” because IRV is not the only ranked choice voting system. It’s certainly the most popular, but there are other ways of counting ballots that contain ranked choices. Minimax is one great example of a different ranked choice system.

I’m speaking to what’s being pushed in the US, I am open to look at other versions, but at the same time after fully looking at STAR I’m not sure how much of an advantage they’ll have over it. In the US we’ve already seen vote splitting and tabulation impact the few elections we have here, and some states have reverted to plurality over it.

As a scientist I’m always open to changing my opinion with new information, but STAR performs strongly across many statistical domains so it’ll be an uphill battle for anything else imo.

If you would like to see where I’m coming from on these points you can check out this video that goes through approval, score, rcv, and star and debunks some rcv claims

It’s 3 hours though so trying to condense to a comment is tough but I found the points eye opening

I’ll try to TLDR the election security standpoint, which is covered in the video: Most voting methods can be tabulated locally, like the fediverse you can tally them at the local level and report updates as you go. For rcv every ballot needs to be shipped to a central location for counting. We lose out on local data that can catch errors along the way, and targeted attacks can be made in transit. The sheer amount of votes and the tabulation process in the central location is slow and error-prone. The video gives some examples of how this has already caused issues in the few states that have used rcv so far

To throw out another critique that opened my eyes: we all agree that plurality voting is bad, but in a way, rcv can be thought of as a series of plurality votes. With each round you only are able to give backing to one person, and based on the order of the rounds some very unfortunate situations can occur. So on a fundamental level I think score voting methods are better, where approval is basically a 0 or 1 score, which is why I prefer STAR as a 0 - 5.

The concept of ballot exhaustion in rcv is also not spoken about enough. I think most people believe that its okay to vote your conscience for first because your next votes will count, but that simply is not the case for many people under rcv. This is also covered in the video

To your point about proportional systems, I think they have a place in our system, and proportional STAR is part of equal votes “package” of methods (also mentioned in the video :D)

It kinda does apply tho

To focus more on the product there are 2 incidents I think of as to why I don’t use brave

• auto adding affiliate links
• selling copyrighted data

honorable mention is their affiliation with crypto

I preface this by saying that I agree that the Justice Democrats and related have not lived up to expectations, but what I’ve realized is just how foolish it is to think that it would have gone significantly differently. And no, I’m not an electoralism doesn’t work person. Every vote matters, but it also needs to go hand in hand with an active and engaged citizenry.

As long as the democrats can point to the republicans and say ‘vote for us or else!’ then we can only chip away at the ranks every couple of years.

The biggest threat we can pose to them is to start getting voting reform passed, which needs to be done in each state.

To not derail too much:
Personally, I find that STAR voting is the best option, with Approval just behind it. I’ve recently learned that ranked choice is a fundamentally flawed system that still leads to 2 strong parties and weakens election security, so I’m actively trying to push back against it when I see it.

Once we drive a wedge between what can literally be described as a chokehold on our country’s freedoms, we can start to make larger impacts at the federal level. For now we need more people on the ground talking to people about the issues and waking them up to its causes. I’ve found it to be a lot nicer out there than it is online, and encourage everyone to start a small group to canvas. It’s going to take all of us